Hair-salon touts, eye-cream hucksters, and other species of urban vermin.

One of the subtle delights of this past year’s Covid-19 lockdown is that it shooed away the commercial panhandlers who pester you in pedestrian thoroughfares. They used to be particularly thick in the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle.

The worst, and most insistent, were the hair-salon racketeers. These touts, generally youngish and male, would approach you and ask you if you got your hair done professionally. You’d say yes, and then the tout would try to persuade you to try out a friend’s new salon, for which you could receive a one-time discount. But to get the discount you’d have to pony up $75—right here and now on the sidewalk.

If you seemed dubious about all this—handing over $75 to a sales rep for a strange hair salon in a distant part of Midtown—he immediately assured you that it was a top-drawer outfit.

“Look! Five stars on Yelp!”—as he flashed his smartphone at you.

After this happened the first time, I spent the rest of the day pondering what a terrible business model the whole thing was. Forget the $75 and “Five stars on Yelp!” nonsense. Most women simply do not visit new hair salons on a whim or because they’re promised cut-rate service. Generally they stick with a single stylist, whom they loyally follow from salon to salon. Or else, if the stylist suddenly packs up and takes a job in Hollywood, they find someone else in a salon they know well. They’ll do this even even it means paying $250 every month or two. Price is not really a selling point in the hair business. Certainly not a deal-closer when you’re being pressured by a complete stranger at Columbus Circle.

A smoother, older kind of sidewalk hustle may be found in the eye-cream racket. These operators are always Israeli, both male and female, and stand (or rather, stood) in doorways of cosmetic shops on Madison Avenue or the stretch of Broadway just north of Columbus Circle. When they see normal women strolling past—I mean the kind who use moisturizer and makeup—they wave sample packets of eye cream at them.

There’s always something unlikely and exotic about their cream. One popular come-on a few years ago was saying it contained flakes of real gold. And so you took the little foil sachet, and the gang in the doorway immediately implored you to step inside and try some of their other wares. Sometimes they’d even offer you a voucher for a free facial or makeover on some day next week, at some spa you never heard of.

The eye-cream hucksters of Columbus Circle have been shut down, along with their neighbors, the soap girls who would stand out on the sidewalk with their baskets of colored, scented handmade samples. I do wish to say, though: those young ladies outside the soap shop were always cheery, never nagged, and arguably provided an essential service. Sometimes you need to give someone a cheap gift, or they’re doing a Secret Santa thing at your office. What could be a lamer and more inoffensive gift for some random coworker you barely know, than a hunk of pretty, perfumed soap?

Columbus Circle today is not entirely safe for social-distancing shoppers, however. Those young people in badges and hoodies proclaiming dodgy charities, they are once again out in strength, waving their clipboards as you come into view. Legalize Sex Perversion! Children in Cages! Save the Narwhal! 

Forty years ago, the neighborhood was a half-step up from a slum. You had the decaying Huntington Hartford Museum just south of the Circle, and the dismal New York Coliseum to the west, where the Time Warner Center now stands. A faint bit of cheer was injected by a banner on an old gabled building to the north, advertising Jacki Sorensen’s Jazzercise.

The sidewalk ruffians were different, too. They didn’t promote hair salons or eye cream or Planned Parenthood. They often wore jackets and ties, and tried to chat you up about Henry Kissinger and the dank history of the British Monarchy. For a mere $300 they would let you have a full year’s subscription to the Executive Intelligence Review, the most informative periodical in the world, which was published right around the corner. That’s our founder on the cover, Lyndon LaRouche!

Dr Molmar

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Q. Dear Dr. Molmar, I have a little adoptive baby who you might say has a “touch of the tarbrush.” According to rumor his grandmother was part-Filipino, or Filipina, you might say. This creates a dilemma when it comes to shopping for disposable diapers at the supermarket. You see, they have Pampers and Huggies for white babies and negro babies and oriental babies of various sexes, but I do not see any for this new baby’s situation. Should I buy the white-baby diapers, or would the oriental-baby diapers be okay? Incidentally I have noticed that the Floogies brand do not seem to be designed for any particular race or sex and simply have a stick-figure baby on the box. Are these healthy to use, do you think?

Huggies for Orientals

A. Whoa, whoa. First of all, it’s probably not a good idea to adopt outside your own race and class, most especially if you are uncertain of the whelp’s antecedents. “According to rumor” is not a legend I would want on the family escutcheon! Furthermore, I frown on disposable diapers simply on principle, since we always found it more convenient to use cloth diapers and have the Happy Nappy deliveryman drop by every day or two.

However, what is done is done, and I’m not here to give lectures.

I was unfamiliar with the Floogies brand, but it sounds very sensible to have a one-size-fits-all disposable diaper, ready to be used by any sex or race. It probably won’t be as neat and tidy as a wrapping designed specifically for a quarter-Filipino, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What is most important is that you never use disposable diapers designed for the opposite sex, as that is a leading cause of homosexuality.

Color separation was something I never really understood. I thought it was a kind of photographic technique wherein your color lithograph was divided up into printable plates, CMYK.

But now we have these other circumstances, some not entirely unrelated.

Opening paragraph:

Separation Is the Solution

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, December 11, 2020

Link below.

https://www.amren.com/videos/2020/12/separation-is-the-solution/

Red Bull Arts will close its West 18th Street location, bringing an end to a six-year run of mounting cutting-edge exhibitions that included key surveys devoted to Rammellzee, Gretchen Bender, and more.

A representative for the art space, which is owned by the energy drink company Red Bull, said that the physical location’s last outing was Akeem Smith solo show there, which closed on November 15.

Famous for serving its iconic drink instead of wine at its openings, the gallery hosted some really bad exhibitions since its opening in 2013.

Famous gay painter and pastel illustrator David Hockney has some medical news for us all.

Of course we already knew that cigarette smoking prevented Alzheimer’s Disease. But this is the first time an important artist has weighed in on the COVID-19 nonsense and how coffin nails may help!

From the New York Post:

“I’m gearing up for a conversation with my landlord,” says dealer Cristin Tierney who operates an eponymous gallery on New York’s Lower East Side.

Read the whole thing here.

(Hat tip to theartnewspaper.com.)

Interesting review here of Antisocial by Andrew Marantz. Surely one of the vicious books of the season.

So now Andrew Marantz tacked to a new course, and homed in on an irresistibly rancid subject: the viral meme as the seducer and assassin of youth. In Antisocial, he illustrates this notion through two extended case studies. One of them is factual, with actual, verifiable people; the other is so cliché-ridden and evasive that I initially took it to be a fictional composite. The “real” example is an intellectually omnivorous male person who worked in Web development, made podcasts, and gradually migrated from libertarian politics to the Far Right. The other example tells about a young woman in her 20s who was supposedly exposed to racialist politics through her boyfriend, and soon tumbled headlong into the Right-wing rabbithole.

Read the whole thing.

Well I see the new Whitney has an Andy Warhol show going on, and I really must get down there, in my fabled guise of Art Reviewer. Stay tuned.

The Atlantic recently did a nice piece on Andy, far superior to most of what one reads in that rag. (I’ll give a link farther down.) But it got me wondering: how much more IS there to know about An-dee?

I met the guy only once, during his last years. He was going around with Rupert Smith one evening around Third Avenue and 13th Street, handing out copies of Interview. Or maybe just carrying copies of Interview. Rupert was in his last years, too. This was maybe April of 1984.

After Andy died I tried phoning Rupert. A friend answered, thought I was trying to collect money he owed me. After a few conversational hiccups, it came out that Rupert was dead too.

Funny thing is, in the late 70s, early 80s, everyday people who were not in the Andy orbit thought of Warhol as a bird that had flown, a Sixties relic who might have been cool in the Edie Sedgwick era, but not anymore. Just a step up from Ed Wood as a practitioner of deliberately bad art.

Nobody saw what staying power Andy would have. Except maybe for Andy.

Here’s a sample of that Stephen Metcalf piece in The Atlantic:

After graduating in 1949, Warhol moved to New York City, and quickly became known as, in one graphic designer’s words, “the best shoe drawer in New York City.” He was hired by the I. Miller company to produce images for its weekly footwear ads in The New York Times. He did illustrations for the slickest magazines and piecework for the biggest corporate accounts, made Christmas cards for Tiffany and perfume ads for Bonwit Teller. He borrowed a technique from the Lithuanian-born American painter Ben Shahn of tracing a sketch in ink, then pressing the wet ink against a piece of absorbent blotting paper to transfer the image. It made for a sensitive line, a line with perceptible temperament, but by a process of reproduction that troubled any idea of an “original” version touched by the artist’s hand.

And here’s the whole thing:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/andy-warhol-pop-art-whitney/576412/

Rupert and Andy on the Fire Island ferry around 1979. I met Rupert about this time. No Andy.

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Q. My eldest child, now 11, tips the scales at over 240 lbs and is only 4’9″. Actually that is an estimate, because our bathroom scale stops at 240. At the county fair they have livestock scales that go much higher but the fair doesn’t open till June.

Dr Molmar

I’m wondering how I can get this child to lose weight. (Before you go blaming this on not getting enough exercise and playing too many vidyagames, let me tell you this child is very active, and we limit vidyagame playing to an hour a day on Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, which is not only low-calorie, but endorsed by AARP.)

Should I get the child’s stomach stapled? My cousin’s neighbor in Schenectady had that done, and she lost 200 lbs, but I don’t think they do it on children.

Or maybe I could put my child on a special diet. I saw a documentary about Lord Byron, and he would lose weight by consuming nothing but soda water and hardtack for weeks on end. Where can you buy hardtack, do you know? Would saltine crackers work, do you think?

I wonder if it’s glandular. 

A. When I was in medical school many years ago it was customary to describe obese children as having a glandular condition. But now there are so many fat children, nobody really cares about glands.

After a lifetime in Family Practice I have come to the conclusion that there isn’t much you can do for fat children, except starve them.

Forget the saltines. A multivitamin pill, plus some grapefruit or sauerkraut juice, is all this child should consume for the next six months. And plenty of water too, to wash the little fat globules out of the body.

I could give you more specific advice if I had a little more information. For example, what is the sex of your child?

Q. My wife and I have long debated the pros and cons of getting our children vaccinated. But we hear vaccination is a leading cause of autism. However, I have also read on one of the online doctor websites that children who are vaccinated as infants are much less likely to wet the bed. So there seems to be a trade-off here, between having an autistic child or one who wets the bed. Do you have any opinions on the matter?

A. I’m sure I’ve answered this before. As the old saying goes, a conspiracy theory can go around the world before an honest physician has time to put his galoshes on. So what if vaccination causes autism? So what if 1 out of 20 or even 1 out of ten children become autistic? I’ll take those odds. I’d rather have an autistic child than a homosexual.

California humorist Steve Sailer announces astounding findings about the art world, in Takimag:

A new study in Science, “Quantifying reputation and success in art,” documents that in the contemporary art world, it’s less a matter of what you know than whom you know.

Art economist Magnus Resch writes in Art News this week of what he has learned from his database of prices paid for roughly 10 million works of art by half a million artists at more than 20,000 museums and galleries around the world.

Read the whole thing.

Classic illustrations courtesy of Jim Flora.

I was using my Spectator-co-uk digital subscription to search for odds and ends in its wonky archive. What, I wondered, did the Speccy have to say about the Angry Young Men in the late 1950s? Better yet, what did they have on Colin Wilson and his friend, the ever-elusive Bill Hopkins?

Not an awful lot, as it turns out. But I did find a hilarious 1958 column by Bernard Levin, talking about end-of-year book-review roundups, and how preposterous they usually are (or were). Colin and Bill appear only as a kind of punchline; by this point they were rumored to be fascist fellow-travelers,  and thus deserving of a sneer and a raspberry from all good-thinking hacks.

Here’s the actual passage. It gives some idea of where the column is going:

The Literary Editor suggested that I take half a dozen books that would not normally have been reviewed at all, put them together and write round them a parody of all those dreary pieces that fill the Sunday Times and the Observer around Christmas-time in which T. S. Eliot says that the best book of the year, as far as he is concerned, was the sixteenth volume of Gschwandkopf’s Geschichte der Norddeutschen Wurstfabriken im Mittelalter and Colin Wilson says his favourites were Stuart Holroyd’s Shaw’s Mysticism as Exemplified in ‘You Never Can Tell’ and Bash ‘Em in the Teeth, the new (and as yet unpublished) novel by Bill Hopkins, whoever he may be. I thought this was rather a’ good idea, and said so.

Mr Hopkins

You’ll notice this also takes a swipe at T.S. Eliot (I see what you did there, Bernard Levin). So Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins and their mate Stuart Holroyd are at least in excellent company.

Cultural bias notwithstanding, the rest of Levin’s piece is a scream. One of his unlikely choices for review is a book on Nigerian cookery. Levin deadpans that the cookbook is “described by [the] publishers as ‘a book for every Nigerian woman’: It is a commonly made claim; but I think in this instance it is fully justified . . . “

The real fun starts when he gets letters from authors and readers who take the reviews seriously. One of them is Barbara Cartland, all chuffed and fluffed to be praised by that nice Mr. Levin.

Mr Wilson

I’m put in mind of this 1958 Spectator column as I assemble five titles I have read this year. Half the books I’ve read or thumbed through in 2018 were really wretched, in particular those that fill a specialty niche. Books about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird are hotter than ever, with each new title even more jejune and cliché-ridden than the last. Another big genre of bad books is what you might call Jewish Paranoia Nonfiction. 2018 brought us Fascism, by Madeline Albright (or rather, her ghostwriter), Tailspin by Steven Brill, The Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg, Can It Happen Here? by Cass Sunstein, The Corrosion of Conservatism, by Max Boot, and many, many more, I am certain. These are just the ones I actually slogged through on Kindle or deep-skimmed during my visits to Barnes & Noble and the Amazon bookshop.

Of course I’m not going recommend any of the foregoing. And to narrow my selection, I’m not going to list anything that I’ve previously reviewed or discussed in these enlightened pages.

And so, in no particular order:

1. De Gaulle, by Julian Jackson (2018). In most histories of WW2 and the postwar period, Charles De Gaulle is little more than a name and a (mostly) offstage presence. He sticks his head in briefly during the 1940 Fall of France, when he was junior cabinet member, and then spends most of the next four years sulking in London. But now we cover this familiar ground with the General as the central character, and it’s refreshing and enlightening. He’s not quite as querulous and unpleasant as he’s usually depicted in popular histories . . . although he gets pretty close.
2. The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben Macintyre (2018). I loved Macintyre’s book on Kim Philby and his circle a few years ago (A Spy Among Friends), but I hesitated to look at this one because it’s about a KGB double-agent I’d never heard of, and takes place in the 1970s and 80s, which don’t much interest me. But I am here to report that this book is a real honey, at least as good as the Philby one. It paints a detailed background picture of KGB operations during the Cold War’s final blaze, when Yuri Andropov seriously believed Ronald Reagan was planning to level Moscow with Pershing II missiles. Our main hero is a KGB lifer named Oleg, who rises to the head of the London station right about the same time that—far away in Langley, Virginia—a CIA officer named Aldrich Ames decides he needs a lot of money. Ames sells a list of CIA/MI6 assets and double-agents to the Russkies for—one million dollars! Shortly afterwards, Oleg is suddenly and mysteriously summoned back to Moscow, where he’s subjected to interrogation, truth serum, and most likely faces eventual torture and death. This book has a happy, but white-knuckle ending: our spook gets smuggled out of the USSR via Finland in the trunk of a car. For years his British friends in Moscow have practiced an escape scenario, against the remote possibility that they’ll have to “exfiltrate” Oleg. The plan involves signaling with candy-bar wrappers, shopping bags, and funny hats; and a dirty disposable baby diaper figures prominently in the escape. If you saw all this in a Hollywood film you might sneer at it as hokum. But it’s all true.
3. Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms, by Paul Willetts (2015). This is the story of Tyler Kent, Anna Wolkoff, Captain Ramsay and the others in the Right Club circle, in the months leading up to their arrests in London in May 1940. It’s strung along in novelistic fashion, which would probably be useful if you were trying to write a screenplay and needed a ready-built straightforward narrative, but I often found the character descriptions unconvincing and the “plot” a little contrived (even though, as I say, it’s a true story).  I know Willetts has some basic facts wrong, but if I go into them here I’ll bore you to tears and sound like a conspiracy theorist. I read this in conjunction some other books pertaining to the Kent/Wolkoff story, just after I’d been reading a lot about Louis-Ferdinand Céline in the 1930s, including his ridiculous voyage to Hollywood to retrieve a girlfriend and get a movie made from his first novel.  In this book it turns out that Anna Wolkoff and Céline were pen-pals (something I’d never come across before) and in fact the latter was planning to visit her on an upcoming trip to London. That trip to London was going to be in April 1940. What with one thing and another, it never came off.  But it’s delightful to discover that Anna was corresponding with him right around the same time she and her crew were sending coded messages to William Joyce in Berlin.  Just one big happy family!
4. The Fifties, by David Halberstam (2018). Highly readable, not-too-breezy dissection of American political, social, and technological history from the latter 1940s to about 1960. This book bears very close comparison with William Manchester’s somewhat similar The Glory and the Dream (1973), but Manchester’s book was more concerned with fads, celebrities and nuances of etiquette (e.g., the artificial familiarity that became de rigueur after World War Two, so that you’d address near-total strangers by their Christian names). Halberstam here prefers to delve into such minutiae as the gossip and office politics that surrounded the development of the H-bomb. If that sounds dreary, and sometimes it is, it’s necessary background to the J. Robert Oppenheimer investigation, an early-50s milestone that has always eluded me. Likewise Halberstam is very good at the describing the backwardness of American rocketry and the space program in the 1950s (we had the German rocket scientists, but didn’t do much with them till the Sputnik era).
5. Railroaded, by Richard White (2011). I was completely oblivious to this book’s existence until this year, but have listened to it now, several times, on Audible. It deals with the real “robber barons” of the post-Civil War era: not oil and steel monopolists, but railway investors who connived endlessly to get Federal money to build western railroads that were completely unneeded, as well as largely unused and often shoddily built.